Field note
Time slows here. The work is cinema. The table sits at the southern edge of inhabited Chile.
The project
ARCA — Artistas en Residencia Cabo de Hornos — is a platform for documentary cinema, founded in 2017 by Alfredo Pourailly De La Plaza, a director, producer and photographer from Iquique.
It is not a festival, and it is not a stay you book. Filmmakers come with a project already in motion — development or montage — and spend concentrated days on the work, with mentors, in a place far enough from the usual industry rooms that the isolation is part of the method.
Since 2017 ARCA has run four in-person residencies in Puerto Williams, receiving 51 filmmakers from Chile, Argentina and Spain. Their own later count speaks of 56 Ibero-American projects across editions in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2024. The last of those moved online.
The founder
The seat of ARCA is not an accident. Puerto Williams sits in the Cabo de Hornos Biosphere Reserve — a singular natural and cultural territory, for its landscapes, for the ancestral Yaghan people, and for a geography so extreme that it is the southernmost town in the world.
Isolation lets you enter into direct contact with the place. We look for films that invite the viewer to ask questions, more than films that give answers.
Film
The film on ARCA’s site, shot in Puerto Williams. Watch it before you decide what kind of south this is.
Isla Navarino
Puerto Williams sits on the north shore of Isla Navarino, south of the Beagle Channel, in Chile’s Magallanes and Chilean Antarctic Region. ARCA calls it the southernmost city in the world. What is not in dispute: this is among the last permanently inhabited places before Cape Horn, inside a UNESCO biosphere reserve, on Yaghan territory.
The island holds some of the southernmost forests on the planet. Lenga and ñirre, snow that can still fall when the rest of a trip has already turned toward summer, a dirt road, a wooden bridge, a horse at the window. Pourailly’s point in 2017 was that none of this is décor. The distance from Santiago — and from the rooms where Chilean cinema usually meets — is the working condition.
Navarino is also a traveller’s island: the Dientes circuit, Cape Horn by sea, the museum in town. ARCA does not sell those days. It occupies the same geography, for a different reason.
The table
The first edition, in the southern winter of 2017, took fifteen projects — ten in development, five in montage — out of more than 140 applications from across Chile. Selected filmmakers received lodging, food and transport to Puerto Williams. The museum in town, the Museo Antropológico Martín Gusinde, was part of the rooms they used. Partners have included Errante Ecolodge, Transbordadora Austral Broom, DAP and SANFIC Industria, with support over the years from Chile’s Fondo Audiovisual.
Pourailly put the other half of the brief in one sentence: not only to make the film, but “how to make my work my living” — production, funds, the industry as it actually stands.
The in-person editions kept that shape: a small cohort, a scholarship, a stretch of days in which the project is the only job. After a pandemic pause, the fourth edition opened to Ibero-America — still the same southern table, ten places.
2024
The 2024 edition did not bring filmmakers to Navarino. It was an online advising programme for Ibero-American and Italian documentary features already in advanced montage — five projects — with mentors including Andrea Chignoli, Jacopo Quadri, Christopher Murray, Carolina Siraqyan and Gabriela Sandoval.
The call closed on 16 August 2024. ARCA’s site still carries the closed notice. Treat that as history, not an open door. The in-person form — Puerto Williams, a table, weather at the glass — is the one the photographs record, and the one the project was built for.
Confirm current calls on arcaresidencia.com rather than assuming a calendar.
Notes
Artistas en Residencia Cabo de Hornos: a documentary-cinema residency founded in 2017 by Alfredo Pourailly De La Plaza. Filmmakers come with a project in development or montage. It is not a hotel, not a festival, and not a trip Remote Frontiers can sell.
The public face of the project is arcaresidencia.com.
ARCA is a reason to look past Torres del Paine without turning Cape Horn into a product. The residency is for filmmakers. The geography is shared.
For the region, start with Patagonia. For a different southern road, Carretera Austral by camper van. For the park most travellers already have in mind, Hiking the W Trek in Torres del Paine and Tierra Patagonia.
The project itself lives at arcaresidencia.com.
